Lady Liberty: Made In Japan?

May 25, 1986|The Morning Call

"I shall live in this country forever, because this nation has given my family a brand new life."

- Hue Cao, 11 years old.

That was the ultimate sentence in a five-paragraph essay that won the Vietnamese refugee child a brand new car to go with her family's brand new life. Unfortunately, the law of the land intervened: to have accepted the automobile, valued at roughly $9,000, Hue's widowed mother would have lost her welfare benefits. Even intervention by President Reagan could not instill some flexibility into the federal welfare laws, so the monetary value of the car has been put into trust for the little girl's education.

She said later that the incident has strengthened her faith in America, a land where even the president cannot circumvent the law. The issue of the bureaucracy vs. a newcomer to these shores has served as a valuable lesson in civics to Hue, her family and those involved in the project.

There is, however, one bothersome aspect of the whole affair. The subject of the essay was to be the Statue of Liberty and what it meant to the writer. The Statue of Liberty . . . perhaps the physical object with which Americans can most easily identify, and which serves as the symbol of this republic to much of the world. The automobile, offered as a prize, was not quite so deeply rooted in the industrial tradition of this great nation.